


Tenets

by unwindmyself



Series: curious shapes shift in the dark [41]
Category: True Blood
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Banter, Female Friendship, Fix-It, Gen, Inspirational Speeches, Mind Control, Reconnaissance, Rescue, Team Dynamics, agency and choices!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-10
Updated: 2014-05-10
Packaged: 2018-01-24 05:23:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1593122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwindmyself/pseuds/unwindmyself
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rather elaborate plan to deliver the captured vampires from the governor's prison camp is put into action.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tenets

**Author's Note:**

> Part four, "The Switch and the Spur."
> 
>  **Original Characters** : Vanessa Quinones, Isi Hill, Antoine Henriques

Once they’re parked in the empty lot not a quarter mile from the facility, Nora and Eric slip back into commander mode.  Eric is responsible for loading everyone up with weapons (and more weapons, and extra ammunition), Nora is responsible for everyone’s covers.

“Is this really necessary?”  Pam rolls her eyes, slipping an ID badge – her picture, fake name Mia Mason – around her neck.

“We can’t glamour them at a distance,” Nora snaps.  “Believability.”

“Right,” Pam mutters.  “Of course.”

“Besides,” Willa says, all chipper.  “If we need to, I bet we can use the lanyards as weapons.”

Eric (currently distributing guns to the Bellefleur girls) starts laughing.  “Very practical.”

“Why don’t we get lanyards, then?” Charlaine asks.

“One, you five have your light,” Nora says.  “Two, you already have guns, not to mention what Tara taught you.  Three, none of you are actually going inside the facility unless you get the signal, at which point we’re far past the lanyard stage.”

“We’re keepin’ guard,” Sookie reminds.  “Nothin’ more.”

Charlaine sighs. “I know,” she mutters.  “I just thought it might be fun.”

“Fun is hardly the point of all this, sweetheart,” Pam drawls.

 

* * *

 

“This place looks like a cartoon of a Hollywood backlot,” Adilyn observes as they approach the facility.  “A really creepy one, but, y’know.”

“I think maybe that’s the point,” Tara says wryly.  “It’s pretty innocuous.  Nobody’s gonna come sniffin’ around just ‘cause it looks shady.”

Willa nods.  “It’s not like my – like the governor would put his secret experimentation prison in the middle of an abandoned industrial building,” she agrees.

“Nah, that special level of fun’s reserved for our next enemy,” Pam smirks.

“Are we all set on how this is going to work?” Eric asks before they can get too much farther with that particular tangent.

“Mm-hmm,” Adilyn and Danika chorus.

“All right, then,” Eric says (he’s trying not to laugh at how perfectly planned that seemed, which might be a side effect of their age, maybe of their mental synchronicity).  “So you,” said with a wave at Nicole, “you and yours are going to follow – what’s on your badge, sister?”

“Olivia Parker,” Nora says coolly, and he notices her accent has gone about as formal as can be for the occasion.

“You’re going to follow renowned psychologist Olivia Parker and her team of experts…”

“Kate Abraham,” Jessica chimes in.

“Carolina Riley,” Tara deadpans. 

Eric pauses to smile. Given his sister’s attention to detail and penchant for a thoroughly crafted lie combined with his daughter’s apparent fondness for a good story, this is the most elaborate ruse he’s been a part of in decades. “ _Kate_ and _Carolina_ as they tour the science end of the facility.  This group’s plan is to observe the conditions that the governor’s test subjects are under and improve them how you see fit.” By this, of course, he means free the currently imprisoned vampires; that’s half of what the goal is tonight, after all.

Nora nods. It’s very important to her that she be leading this particular group: so she can see what they’ve been doing to the vampires, so she can see what it is the governor’s people have learned, so she can make amends for the fact that she indirectly got them in this mess in the first place. “Meanwhile,” she takes over, “Doctor Luka Sawyer –”

“I don’t know where you got these ridiculous names,” Eric mutters, still amused.

“Etymology databases and random number generators,” Nora snaps, “please let me finish?”

“As you will,” he shrugs. He doesn’t know why he expected anything less.

“Doctor Sawyer will be leading Miss Mia Mason and Miss Vivienne Avery to speak to the governor and his conservative femme fatale of a partner in crime,” Nora finishes. “Oh, and they’ll be accompanied by – by – ” She lazily waves a hand at Jason and Sam. When they’d been making the ID badges, she and Willa had forgotten they needed to make ones for them, so they’d whipped one up at Merlotte’s when they all convened earlier; as much because they hadn’t wanted to bother pulling up the various tools they’d used to create everyone else’s as because it was meant as a consolation prize, they’d let them pick their own fake names.

“Thomas Aaron,” Sam supplies, expression carefully blank.

Braelyn reaches for Jason’s badge to read it aloud herself. “ _Clark Wayne_ ,” she says incredulously.

And Jason just shrugs, looking uncomfortable. “We all clear now?”

“Going over the rules once more,” Nora insists.

“Seriously?” Jason groans.

“I don’t think she was askin’ you,” Charlaine points out, grinning cheekily.

And Jason sighs. Sure, Sookie and the girls may have fairy-blasted all that confusing racist mojo out of him this afternoon, but he still doesn’t much like getting bossed around, and he sure doesn’t like being sassed by an infant, but what’s a guy gonna do, really.

“One,” Nora says. “No killing unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“If it’s you or them, it’s necessary,” Tara clarifies.

“Two,” Eric cuts in. “I don’t want to see anyone getting killed because they’re trying to play the hero when they should have stepped aside, so know your limits.”

“And three,” Nora finishes. “Keep an eye out for the others in your party. This won’t work if we’re all running separate missions.”

“Got it,” the fairy girls agree in unison.

 

* * *

 

“Names,” the man at the door says as they approach.

Eric and Nora exchange glances, trying to decide which of them ought to go first, but it’s Pam who speaks up, raising an eyebrow and tossing her perfectly-styled hair over her shoulder like a mean girl cheerleader in a high school movie, and she doesn’t actually address the door guard, she addresses Eric.  “Doctor Sawyer,” she says all soothingly, her Southern drawl all but disappeared, slid into something softer and more difficult to place.  She lays a hand on his shoulder, raises an eyebrow.  “Clearly the man’s been living under a rock, I’m so sorry for the trouble.”

Yeah, sometimes it’s easy to tell that she used to be a woman who made her living telling men what they wanted to hear.

“It’s no trouble at all, Ms. Mason,” Eric replies, his own expression reading like he’s trying to mask his impatience with some vague bemusement.

“I’m sorry?” the guard interrupts.

“You’re only addressing the world’s expert on monster physiology,” Pam rolls her eyes.  “If you weren’t clearly so out of touch, you might have seen his appearance on _The O’Reilly Factor_ this week.”

Tara, who’s positioned herself behind the man on his right (Jessica’s on the left), looks at Pam and mouths, “Nice touch.”  Nora, who’s beside her niece, nods approvingly.

“I don’t…”

But before the guard can finish, Tara and Jessica grab his wrists and Eric leans close, very close.  It’s as Willa had warned them: some of the guards are guinea-pigging for the governor’s people’s new anti-glamour contacts.  As if that’s really a long-term solution.  Eric reaches up fast as he can to pull the lenses off and hand them to his sister, who pulls a tiny plastic box from her purse and drops the things in (impractical as they are, they still merit further study), and with that taken care of, he slips into a glamour.

“You’re going to let my colleagues through without a fuss,” he says.  “Nobody needs to be warned about this.  In fact, you’re just going to sit right here until I come back and tell you otherwise.”

“All right,” the guard says.  “Are you really a TV doctor?”

“If that makes you feel better, I certainly am,” Eric replies as he waves everyone in the door behind him. 

 

* * *

 

“Lilith,” Nora whispers, eyes going wide and hand flying to the charm of her necklace.  Feeling that it’s the little heart of Jessica’s gift and not the old one reminds her to catch herself, though, and trancelike though she’s gotten she’s quick to correct, “Sodding hell.”

“Doctor Parker?” asks the rather dense guard they’ve finagled into giving them a tour.

Nora’s not responding, though, she’s frozen in her tracks and staring at window after window into the experiments the governor’s people are running. Psychology, sexuality, stamina – it’s all on display, and though there’s little about it that seems particularly innovative it’s still worrisome, particularly given the state that the test subjects are clearly being kept in.

“Doctor Parker,” Tara mutters, meaning to snap her out of it; behind her, Nicole and Vanessa shift anxiously, like they’re wondering what they’ve missed.

“ _Olivia_ ,” Jessica hisses, tapping her arm rather assertively.

“Oh,” Nora mumbles, “yes, of course.  Let’s…”

“Is something the matter, Doctor?” the guard interrupts.

“Shit,” Vanessa whispers.

Nora gives the shortest of nods, and lightning-fast Jessica wraps an arm around the guard’s waist to hold him still while Tara yanks out his contacts.  “You were never here,” she says.  “You’re gonna get in your car, drive home, and find yourself a new job, and you’re not gonna remember anything about what the governor was doing or what you might have approved of about it.”

“The doors,” Nora murmurs, eyeing the electronic locks at each of them.

“Before you go, though,” Tara adds, “you’re gonna do us a solid and unlock all these doors for us, okay?”

The man nods, and with Jessica at his back to keep prodding him along and Antoine moving to the front of him to stare him down, he idly offers, “That one’s silver. The big one. All of them are.”

The holding area, the cells, where through the barred windows they can see exhausted-looking female vampires in what might as well be pajamas milling around, some talking and some just staring at goodness knows what with hungry looks in their eyes.

“How many are there?” Tara asks.

“Two for women, two for men,” he says. “There’s solitary cells, too, but we haven’t had anyone kept there for weeks.”

Jessica and Nicole give matching shivers – it’s easy to imagine what happened to the last prisoners who were kept in that condition. “You getting this?” Nicole hisses at Isi.

“Every bit,” he agrees, letting his camera pan over the sorry spectacle visible through the windows.

 

* * *

 

Room after room gets opened; research gets stolen (Antoine and Vanessa carry it between them); scientists and guards get glamoured and sent on their way if they don’t lash out at the team first, get glamoured and knocked out if they do, just get killed if they try to kill first (Tara and Jessica favor bullets, Nora broken necks; the humans are surprisingly – not _comfortable_ , but they’re hardly squeamish about it, more than once Nicole cries out or Isi has to turn his camera away but they don’t argue); the vampires they rescue listen to their brief, vague explanation of the situation and follow them through the corridors like they’re rallying.

Once the last of the holding areas is open (Nicole makes it her official job to get all of the silver door handles) and they’ve led the vampires to the wide-open garage they knew to expect from Willa’s map (it’s as good a place as any to make their exit from) there’s a very certain buzz beginning to overtake the crowd.

“When are we gonna get to kick their asses?” someone shouts.

“Whose?” Tara asks, folding her arms as she scans the crowd for who said it.

“The humans,” another voice calls out, like it’s obvious. “The fucking assholes who kept us here, who tried to get in our fucking heads.”

Nora, Tara, and Jessica look at each other, then glance at Nicole and her friends (who are barely running crowd control at this point; Isi hasn’t put his video camera down, Vanessa’s moved toward the control panel for all of the industrial garage doors, but that’s about it). “You wanna take this one?” Tara asks Nora in a low voice.

Nora sighs. She looks out at the crowd, these strangers they’ve tried to save today, and she knows what she has to do.

“I won’t stop you if that’s what you intend,” she begins. “It’s within your rights to seek that sort of vengeance, and nobody could fault you for it, either. Some of you have seen that we’ve taken care of the guards and doctors we’ve passed, though, and you’ve seen why we’ve done what we’ve done. You’ve seen that while they had been doing horrible things to you, nobody can dispute that, not all of them were acting out of malice or out of anything other than the simple imperative to follow orders.”

“So we shouldn’t kill them,” a dark-haired woman at the front of the crowd says, her voice flat like she can’t believe what she’s hearing. “We shouldn’t kill them like they tried to kill us.”

“I’m not saying that,” Nora declares. “None of us are saying that. But I do want to ask you something: do you really see yourself as the merciless killers the humans thought? Predators first, rational creatures a distant second?”

“What the hell are you talking about?” grumbles a short redheaded fellow.

Nora sets her jaw; on either side of her, Tara and Jessica take up defensive stances just in case. “I’m proposing,” Nora begins, “that we prove to the humans that we’re not worth imprisoning and hunting. Not by hunting them first –” here she pauses, somewhat for dramatic effect and somewhat to consider what she’s saying herself – “But by showing them we can be more than monsters if we try.”

Another roar goes through the crowd, soft and seemingly more perplexed than angry. Ruthless liberators asking for fair conduct? It’s a bit at odds, but it’s the situation they’re faced with.

“Will you just let us get out of here already?” that woman asks dryly. “Save us the poetry.”

Off a permissive wave of the eldest vampire’s hand, Vanessa sets the doors to opening, and the rescued vampires stream out in droves. None stay behind, most break into a run the second they’re outdoors, but still Tara asks, not entirely cynical, “You think that worked?”

“I don’t know,” Nora says. “But I’ve done what I can.” To undo what she’d done before. They – Tara and Jessica, at least – can hear that, clear as if she’d said it aloud.

Suddenly an alarm starts shrilling, flashing, and the humans all startle.

“The vans,” Jessica shouts. “Y’all get in one of the vans and get the fuck out.”

“Call Luna and Lafayette,” Tara adds as the group piles into the nearest open van (thank goodness it’s open, but the security around here really isn’t as good as it ought to be, all things considered, which is a miracle unto itself). “Head back to Merlotte’s and let them know what’s goin’ on. We’ll get it taken care of.”

By the time the van’s started up and speeding off, the doors are all starting to slam shut, and another set of guards (there are an infinite number of them, it would seem, and none of them wholly effective) has entered.

“Yeah, I think the governor’s gonna be interested in this,” one of them smirks.


End file.
